Like most of our monthly updates, this “August 2013” release contains a vast number of fixes, improvements and enhancements all across the board, and for all three platforms. It also provides a small handful of new major features that we are really excited about and think will make a great difference in your day-to-day work using Oxygene.
First off, 6.1 marks the introduction of our Refactoring engine for Oxygene. We’re starting out small, with one very useful refactoring: the ability to safely rename identifiers solution-wide. But this also lays the groundwork for more refactorings to be added in the near future.
We have also vastly expanded the Go To Definition feature of the IDE to work for external references. This makes it easier than ever to have a peak at the declaration of the classes you are using, from .NET classes such as System.String to Cocoa ones such as UITableView. Just right-click, choose Go To Definition, and Oxygene will bring up the class declaration – in full Pascal syntax, of course – ready for you to review, or to copy method headers from.
Cocoa developers will love to hear that we added even better support for Deployment Targets to the compiler, with improved weak linking, and optional warnings when your code uses classes that may not be available in the lowest deployment target SDK you selected for your project. This goes way beyond what Xcode offers, and – especially with iOS 7 coming up now – will make your life supporting apps on new and older OS versions so much easier.
Of course that’s not all. There’s also support for optional interface methods in Cocoa, unsigned integer types on Java, and much more. You can find the full list of changes on our What’s New and Change Logs pages.
How to get Oxygene 6.1
As always, Oxygene 6.1 is a free update to all active subscribers, and can be downloaded now.
If your subscription has elapsed, now is a great time to renew to get access to the latest release, and all the good stuff we have cooking for the near future.
Oxygene for Prism Customers
Oxygene 6.1 is also the first release that is no longer available from Embarcadero under the Prism brand, and it will not accept Prism XE3.2 serial numbers. But as a reminder: we are committed to honoring SA contracts Embarcadero might have sold you with the promise of Prism coverage (i.e. before April 23) . Please email sales@remobjects.com with your SA details, and we’ll sort you out with ongoing access to Oxygene for .NET for the remainder of your SA period.
Of course, if you do not have SA, or if you want to take advantage of Oxygene on the Cocoa and Java/Android platforms as well, you can always renew or cross-grade to the full Oxygene package at any time.
More to Come
2013 has been a great year for Oxygene so far, but we’re not done yet. We’ve got more amazing things planned for the rest of the year, and beyond. So make sure to stay up to date with your subscription.
Happy coding!
marc hoffman,
Chief Architect
RemObjects Software
